Quick post about a change I made that’s worked out well.
I was using OpenAI API for automations in n8n — email summaries, content drafts, that kind of thing. Was spending ~$40/month.
Switched everything to Ollama running locally. The migration was pretty straightforward since n8n just hits an HTTP endpoint. Changed the URL from api.openai.com to localhost:11434 and updated the request format.
For most tasks (summarization, classification, drafting) the local models are good enough. Complex reasoning is worse but I don’t need that for automation workflows.
Hardware: i7 with 16GB RAM, running Llama 3 8B. Plenty fast for async tasks.
You really only need a little more RAM than your GPU’s VRAM (unless you’re doing CPU offloading, which is extremely slow). Otherwise, I did the same thing recently too, and was surprised I was able to get it a Qwen 9B to fix a bug in a script I had. I think Sonnet would’ve fixed in a lot fewer tries, but the 9B model was eventually able to fix it. I could’ve fixed it myself quicker and cleaner than both, but it was an interesting test.